Inventor Flint Lockwood is back in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. He is now working for his idol Chester V at Live Corp, a major technology company. Flint finds out his water-into-food invention was never destroyed, and is now creating food-animal hybrids called foodimals. He must return to Swallow Falls and, with the help of his friends, get the foodimals under control.

Directors Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn told TFK that the creative team had fun inventing foodimals for the film. They came up with hundreds of names—like mosquitoast, tacodile, meatbalrus, and shrimpanzee—and let the film’s plot determine which critters made it into the final film. “There’s a term called portmanteau, where you take two words and it becomes one word,” Cameron said. “So it’s easy to take a watermelon and elephant and it becomes a watermelephant!”

This movie picks up right where the last left off. What’s different this time?

KRIS PEARN:

Flint was the only guy in his town who wore a lab coat. He was the only guy in the science world. In this movie, after getting evacuated from Swallow Falls, he moves to beautiful San Fran, California. He becomes a part of this corporation called Live Corp, which has this Google/Yahoo-type campus. Suddenly, he is in a sea of people who are just like him. He’s not the odd-man out, and he has to figure out how to hang on to his old friends as he gains success in this world.

TFK:

How did you get the ideas for the foodimals?

CODY CAMERON:

We had living food creatures at the end of the first film. There were gummy bears, roast chickens and pizza slices. We started this film knowing we wanted to do food creatures.

PEARN:

We knew we wanted certain foods for their iconic value, like we had to have a cheeseburger because that’s how our first movie began. It was Flint’s first food invention. Some foods we knew were going to come into this film.

CAMERON:

If the characters are in a certain environment, like a breakfast bog, [we thought about] what kind of animals you would have in a breakfast bog. Mosquitoast!

TFK:

What’s your favorite foodimal?

CAMERON:

It keeps changing for me. Right now the tacodile is one of my favorites.

PEARN:

Yeah the tacodile is really fun. I love the leek in the boat because it keeps coming back.

Cheesespiders because spiders creep me out. The only problem is you still want to eat it. Well, it wants to eat you.

TFK:

The creative team came up with hundreds of foodimal names. Is there a foodimal that didn't make the film that you would have liked to see?

CAMERON:

There was a scene on a crème brûlée (krem bru-lay) glacier that’s no longer in the film. We had a chocolate s’mores-rex with a marshmallow body, graham cracker mouth and broken up chocolate squares for teeth. It was like a giant s’mores T. rex, and it would breathe fire and crush the crème brûlée.

TFK:

What's it like to work on a movie with so much food?

CAMERON:

When we were working on the cheesespider, we would get so hungry. We’d be like, “Should we go?” “Yep,” and we’d all walk over to In–N–Out, a hamburger chain here in California.

PEARN:

It didn’t happen with carrots, though!

TFK:

What makes Flint a great inventor?

CAMERON:

He’s really creative. He doesn’t let anything stop him.

PEARN:

Part of success is failing on the way. We love Flint so much because he isn’t daunted by failure. He’s got this blind optimism about everything in the world.

TFK:

Why should kids see this movie?

PEARN:

We hope people are entertained. It has a great message about being true to yourself…

CAMERON:

…cleaning up your mess…

PEARN:

…eating everything on your plant, or it’ll come back and try to eat you. Hopefully, kids have a good time.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, rated PG, hits theaters in 3-D on September 27.

For more on Cloudy 2, click here to read and watch interviews with the cast, and click here to watch TFK Kid Reporter Amelia Compton make foodimals with a chef.